Thursday, July 15, 2010

Prince CD Sales Up, Bombing Online

Prince might think the Internet is over (or maybe not), but one thing is for sure, hype still works to sell product. As I posted a few days ago, Prince's comments on the Internet were well-planned in order to make people aware of his new album 20TEN.

As he did with his previous Planet Earth album in July 2007, 20TEN was released as a free giveaway attached to the London's The Mail on Sunday newspaper. In this case, the sales of the paper were up 27% (from 1,230,000 to 1,572,000). Planet Earth reached more people (2,801,000), but the increase was only 23% for the newspaper.

But that doesn't mean that the album has any Internet P2P traction though. According BigChampagne's Eric Garland, who's company measures the file sharing world, 20TEN has seen very little online activity, with downloads only in the low thousands. According to Prince, the album will not be available for digital distribution, but it seems that so far no one online cares anyway.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Who's Getting Paid In The Music Business


There's a big disconnect when it comes to musicians and where they think the money for their efforts comes from. Although in the Music 3.0 world the view has changed somewhat, artists and bands always believed that if they sold a lot of records (meaning CD's, vinyl, digital downloads and recorded music in general) that they'd make a lot of money in return in a major label deal. Well, not from the sales of music they won't.

In the chart above from high-power industry attorney Don Passman, author of the excellent book All You Need To Know About The Music Business, we see just where the money goes and it's not pretty.

I think that the figure on the bottom says it all - "For every $1,000 of music sold, the average musician makes $23.40!"

But this isn't all that different in the grand scheme of musical things than it ever was. Another high-power attorney, Ken Hertz (who handles Beyonce, No Doubt, Christina Aquilera and Alanis Morrisette among others), once told me that it was an acknowledged industry insider fact that bands and artists have always made 95% of their money on the road, not from records. Records are the engine that make everything go, but not the real breadwinner, as we see from the chart.

There's a nice article about this chart at the Root.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Fan Purchase Motivations


Here's an interesting chart that outlines the purchasing motivations of everyone that might buy music from a band or artist and how to take advantage of them.

The chart pretty much nails music purchasing in a very simplistic way and the suggestions on how to sell to each group are excellent.

Sorry, but I don't remember where the chart came from and I can't find the source after multiple searches (their SEO obviously isn't that great).

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Monday, July 12, 2010

6 Ways The Biggest Artists Use Social Media

Sandbox recently had a great post regarding how the biggest musical artists use social media these days. The data came from famecount.com, a most interesting site that measures the number of fans, followers and subscribers for all sorts of popular entities.

While you can read the original article for yourself, there are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from the two charts on the left.

1) MySpace participation is clearly an afterthought by major artists these days. Katy Perry and John Mayer’s MySpace sites haven’t been updated since mid-November last year, while Britney Spears’ MySpace profile boasts a single blog post from 2010 so far. Other MySpace blogs gathering tumbleweed in June include those of Ashley Tisdale, Coldplay, 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake.


2) The stars keep in touch with their fans often. The 20 top artists on Famecount’s rankings posted (or had posted for them) an average of 25.5 Facebook status updates in the first 28 days of June, 81.9 tweets, and a only 3.4 MySpace blog posts.

3) The most prolific user when it comes to social engagement is Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, who racked up an astounding 113 Facebook updates and 367 tweets in the first 28 days of June. That's a rate of 13 tweets a day, not including retweets and replies (of which there were many). Other prolific tweeters included Justin Bieber (336 tweets) and Diddy (335 tweets).

4) All three appear to be tweeting themselves most of the time, and while there’s a lot of self-promotion going on for new releases and products, they also retweet and reply to fans a lot. Only two more of the top 20 artists tweeted more than 100 times in the period covered, Demi Lovato (151) and Katy Perry (106), and in both cases they appeared to be tweeting personally too, rather than having someone do it for them.

5) Alicia Keys, Demi Lovato and Eminem all use Facebook mainly to blast marketing messages at their fans. In fact, that reflects a wider trend for these top-tier artists to use their Facebook presences to promote content – particularly new videos and iTunes releases.

6) Photos posted from backstage, in the studio or at promotional events, livestreams and webchats, and shout-outs to cities after playing a gig there, seemed to be working well on Facebook and Twitter for these artists.

The article takes the reasonable position that none of this may account for an artist's popularity, and they may be popular on social networks just because they're popular in the off-line world. The problem is, there's no way to really know at this point. But it's clear than the social networking of these artists are not hurting them and they feel it's well worth their time.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Hashtags Redux

I wrote about Twitter hashtags frequently in the past, but it's worth bring up again because not enough people using Twitter seem to get the idea. If your tweets are personal, then hashtags aren't necessary, but if you're a band or artist or a business, they're extremely important to helping potential visitors find you.

Using a hashtag (the "#" symbol before a keyword) is like including a keyword in your tweet. It's an unofficial feature of Twitter but now widely accepted and supported, and is an easy way for people to search for and find a particular topic.

Here's how it works, using some of my own tweets from the last couple of days.


"Rock Of Ages" - Def Leopard Isolated Vocals. An unusual vocal in many ways. http://bit.ly/xnQ1b #recording #producers #vocals #bands


This is a simple tweet regarding a post from my Big Picture blog last week, complete with a shortened url link. At the end are the hashtags #recording, #producers, and #musicians. How did I select them? First of all both "recording" and "producers" appear in the tweet, but I researched them first to see what kind of searches there were by going to twitter.com/search. There I searched for "#recording" and determined that there was a sizable enough search so it was worth using, as was "musicians." I figured that bands would be most interested in this tweet and the blog post, so I did a search and found that "bands" was also sizable, so I used it as well.

Here's another way I could've used the hashtags in this tweet.


"Rock Of Ages" - #Def Leopard Isolated Vocals. An unusual #vocal in many ways. http://bit.ly/xnQ1b 



In this case I embedded the hashtag directly into the tweet text. This works too but I find it too difficult to read and it can turn quickly into a negative for less sophisticated users, so leaving some room at the end for the tags seems to work a lot better.

Here's another example.

"The Magic High-Pass Filter. Some tips for using the mixer's secret weapon. http://bit.ly/dpL9bv #highpass #filter #mixing"

Same thing here. I did a quick search and discovered that #highpass had a lot more searches than #high-pass and #mixing more than #mixer (there was also some confusion with a food processor as well).

Since I've been using hashtags the traffic to my blog sites have gone up by about 50% and I've gained some more Twitter followers as well. Using hashtags is a great way to help people find you, but don't forget to include a link to take them to your blog or website as well, since that's the real goal.

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

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